The first place we move away from God or toward God is through our thoughts. The devil works through our thinking more than anywhere else. Good thinking or bad thinking are real possibilities because God gives us the freedom to choose our thoughts.

We can’t control what is in the world, but we can control what is in our own thought-life. We can choose the content of our thinking. We can’t do it perfectly, but we can make progress in filling our thought-life more and more with God’s Word and the promises announced there.

Our thinking has four parts. First, there are ideas and images. Then there is information and intelligence.

Ideas
We have been forming an idea system since we were born. We have been influenced through experience, the teachings of others, and watching the behavior of our family and community. We don’t realize what is reality and what is false reality in our lives. When we look at our ideas, we do a reality check.

To transform our personal idea system from one of ruin to one of goodness, we have to replace our ideas with the idea system of Jesus. This is the most difficult and painful process in life. To actually change our minds.

Most people have their ideas firmly established when it comes to life’s values and beliefs by the time they are 12-13 years old. It is extraordinarily rare for us to change our thinking after that. It is essential that we do so, if we want our thinking to be more and more like the thinking of Jesus.

What is an example of thinking that many people hold to, that is destructive in their lives?

Consider “relativism,” for example. This is the belief that one person’s moral ideas are equally good to another person’s moral ideas. There is no right or wrong; only what you think is right and wrong. Your ideas are valid if you are sincere. Relativism has a strong influence in our society. No values can be wrong except, of course, if you disagree with me. Then you are wrong.

Images

Along with ideas, images fill our minds. They are basic and concrete and they have a powerful effect. Ideas and images are Satan’s main tools against us. What preoccupies our thought life? Ideas and specific images.

Sexual images are overwhelming in society. We see sexualized images in advertisement and the media everywhere. Pleasure and power await us as we think of these images. The multibillion-dollar pornography business is a huge tool that Satan uses today to tie minds to an endless cycle of lust and guilt and emptiness.

Jesus uses images to move us from self-worship to self-denial. The most powerful image in this is the cross. To look at a cross is to sense his love, sacrifice, devotion and strength. The cross is a reminder of what he did, but it is also a beckon of hope of what he is doing.

As we are being transformed to be like Jesus, the key is to take the destructive ideas and images we have and replace them with the ideas and images Jesus possesses. We take on the mind of Christ. This is a possibility for life in his Kingdom now.

1 Cor. 2:16 (NLT)
How could they? For, “Who can know what the Lord is thinking? Who can give him counsel?”

But we can understand these things, for we have the mind of Christ.

Where have you had challenges in your thinking?